photo by smith

SPACE EATS SPACE

space is an unfolding hole for more space to collapse
a hotbed for maniacal brooding
people will remain afraid…adjacent to leisure
….and that leaves me strangely gentle
gentle in the knowledge that someone will know me
that someone will stay and believe what i'm leaving

like discovering you never were. here in this dream
our answers invariably will be different
a nihilist will derail your suspicion
in faith and all that is bogus
and if i should view you as slapshot hockey sound
you must believe this, without question

also..the word "proverb" is misleading 
i don't like it….i won't use it
your noise is not my problem
groucho barks at the basketball. the night ends
confusion and comfort trade skins

such malice from an unlit candle, frankly
such candor from the feckless surgeon, stanley
you empty your eyes into open holes
or maybe you don't
like i was saying, there needs to be a light

something to guide our eyes without lying
but rather a light that would free us from vegetables
and calendars.
the sort of light that would mention
"all is okay - place your face in a pillow and die a little"

because time is born at the moment it dies
try a little less, work a bit lesser
it's easy to try
not knowing to try is easier than knowing
some things are better off dead on arrival

still space will eat itself safely

Andrew Boerum

review
SPACE CAKE, AMSTERDAM, YUYUTSU RD SHARMA

The latest volume from the celebrated Nepalese poet is, at the same time, a continuation of his life-work and a generous expansion of his themes and settings. In both cases, the result is refreshing and satisfying, a rare glimpse of a restive mind at work that is foreign and exotic yet also approachable and intimate.

Mr Sharma writes in a tightly disciplined free verse of largely short, powerful lines. At times, the lines are grouped into couplets, but usually the short poems (the longest is less than five pages) are arranged into paragraphs that are never overly long or extravagantly complicated.

The volume’s three parts are organized by geography. Wind Islands takes place in England and Ireland, Spacecake Amsterdam is set in Holland and Whitman’s Daughter is as American as its title suggests, and all three represent, to my mind, an important step in this poet’s growth as a writer of international scope.

All of his readers will have favorites, of course, so all I can do is suggest the poems which I found the most satisfying, but I would strongly urge you to try them all: Mr Sharma is not a one-size-fits-all poet.

Wind Islands contains a number of stunning poems. “Temple London” combines urban grit with eastern mystery and “Wind” re-imagines the natural world through language that has the solemnity of scripture. But my favorite is “Look Alike, Galway,” which weds the physical sultriness of seduction with resonant echoes of myth:

as the lovers

sang songs
of the drifting winds that once visited

her frenzied dance
on the chest of the naked glaciers and sun parched continents.

But as the narrator “stretched/folds of her skin back on her luscious face”

 years receded into
 the faint drawers of my age,

 time stepped down
 the ladder of my lifespan . . .

The title poem of Spacecake Amsterdam has become something of a signature piece for the author, but there are several other gems in this part that deserve mention. One, which I would like to quote in its entirety, gives the reader a sense of how Mr Sharma brings together east and west, sex and religion, in new and stimulating ways:

“Window Dolls”

 In the lanes
 of Noordeinde, Den Haag

 it’s the window dolls
 that you would see everywhere

 like idols
 of eighty-four thousand Hindu gods

 on the streets
 of Varanasi or Kathmandu.

 And everywhere dogs
 trotting along humans

 like lusts frozen
 along the lonely evenings like a leash.

 And taking them to be
 the idols in the shrine

 I sometimes bow to them
 fearing their prowess and prime.

I must confess that I warmed most to the twelve poems in Whitman’s Daughter. Part of the allure, once again, was the yoking of heterogeneous images, but I also believe that Mr. Sharma is at home in the American landscape (and increasingly with the American idiom), and the power of forging a new identity from powerful opposites has never been more apparent in his work. His diction is sharp, his images potent, his daring continuously on display. See, for example, this section of “Your Fingers”:

 long and soft
 tendrils of a long lost sleep
 wisp of the marble
 limbed goddesses sculpted
 by saints in the dark caves

 in stale and smothered airs
 of the NYC subway,
 grim as a graveyard,
 your fingers in my hand
 a miracle
 from the goddess
 of the winds of the world.

Most noted, justifiably, for his poems about his native Nepal, Mr Sharma proves in this volume that he is a genuine poet of the English-speaking world whose gentle yet ironic gaze is equally at home in the west, and equally adept with cultures which must have been as strange to him at first as the yeti is to us.

So, if you want a glimpse of the future, when cosmopolitan writers cross borders and enrich techniques, Spacecake Amsterdam is an excellent place to start. Mr Sharma is living proof that English has become the medium for international cultural exchange, and that poets of his skill and scope are its chroniclers and sages.

Robert Scotto
Professor of English and Comparative Literature, retired
Baruch College, CUNY

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